Spherical video typically involves high resolution footage to capture the entire 360 degree field of view (FOV). Streaming spherical video involves a high bitrate link. Typical networks, like the Internet, have limited streaming bandwidth. Cellular networks also typically have limited bandwidth. Streaming high bitrate video over 3G/4G/LTE networks consumes a lot of data. In conventional spherical video playback, on the display side, the user sees only a small part of the spherical image. The small part of the spherical image that the user sees is called a region of interest (ROI).
Conventional spherical video playback typically streams the entire spherical field of view (i.e., a 360 degree field of view). Streaming the entire spherical field of view allows the ROI to be changed in response to the user moving his or her head. A change in ROI needs to happen very fast (typically <20 ms) to avoid a noticeable delay on the display side. Longer delays tend to provide a poor user experience, and in many cases trigger a sickness feeling.
It would be desirable to implement low bitrate encoding of spherical video to support live streaming over a high latency and/and low bandwidth network.